On an Investment-Consumption Model with Transaction Costs

Abstract

This paper considers the optimal consumption and investment policy for an investor who has available one bank account paying a fixed interest rate and n risky assets whose prices are log-normal diffusions. We suppose that transactions between the assets incur a cost proportional to the size of the transaction. The problem is to maximize the total utility of consumption. Dynamic programming leads to a variational inequality for the value function. Existence and uniqueness of a viscosity solution are proved. The variational inequality is solved by using a numerical algorithm based on policies, iterations, and multigrid methods. Numerical results are displayed for $n = 1$ and $n = 2$.